Monday, March 5, 2007

Not doing to well today. I took one gram of DCA in the morning, one gram at noon. I feel very poorly. I have not mentioned a few things, in regard to dosing - my weight is 105 kilos. Looking at some recommended dosing information other sites - 25 mg/kg/day - seems to be suggested quite regularly - I would have a daily intake of 2.625 grams. That will mean taking one more cap at bed time.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

I felt pretty good back on Friday when I made my last post. As if. I have felt really crappy since, lots of abdominal pain and ongoing constipation. I don't want to take any heavy pain killers because they would add to the constipation. Today I feel a little better the pain has receded though I am quite tired.

I took 4 capsules of DCA yesterday and I am taking 6 today. Two at 8:00 AM, two at noon and two before I go to bed tonight. Could the cooling of the pain be a result of the DCA and tumors shrinking? Little to early to think of that but I can't help but wish.

Friday, March 2, 2007

I started taking DCA on February 27th, 2007. Based on what the rats were fed in Alberta and allowing for a safety margin (?) I hope to get to the point of eating 4 grams a day in a week or so. I am starting with half a gram in the morning and half a gram in the evening. On the 28th I took 3 of the half gram capsules as I did on March 1. Today I am going to take 4, one early in the morning, two at noon and one in the evening.

There are no obvious side effects or any metabolic changes I can detect at all. I don't expect any of the hoped for real therapeutic effects for a few weeks after the drug has built up in my body.

I should mention other medication is am taking, the most significant of which is prednisone to make up for the lack of action by my adrenal glands. I take 10mg in the morning. I also use inhalers for asthma, mild medication to let me sleep at night (prednisone side-effect) and various vitamin supplements. I have been using some laxatives to combat side effects from the topotecan and the anti-nausea drugs that accompanied that treatment but hopefully that is almost over. In fact today I feel better than I have in a couple of months as a result of a little more distance from my last round of chemo.

I was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in March 2006. Like anyone else who receives this news my wife and I were devastated. I knew enough at that time to know my long-term survival was quite unlikely. In the next 28 days I had a CT scan, biopsies were taken by a respirologist, brain scan and a bone scan. On the 28th day I saw an oncologist for the first time and the next day I started chemo. The first run of chemo was a combination of Cisplatin and Etoposide. Three days of treatment then 18 days off, repeated 4 times.

About half way through I had 15 days of radiation on the cancer then a month after the chemo was finished 10 days of cancer on my brain as a preventative measure against brain tumors developing. The treatments went well. With various delays because of low blood counts I walked out of the cancer clinic in August thinking I was cured.

I have to applaud the health care system in my province, in fact across Canada. The treatment I received was completely covered by our provincial health insurance, fast, professional, and I think as good as is available in the world.

In November I started to feel tired and short of breath with very little exertion. I went back to the clinic and discovered the cancer had returned, manifested by a swollen lymph node in my neck that the oncologist found in about a minute and a half and inflamed adrenal glands that were discovered after a CT scan.

I was immediately booked for more chemo, this time a drug called topotecan. It was clear that this time around the treatment was palliative, there would be no cure. I could only hope for the cancer to be forced into remission but there is no current treatment that will beat this particular cancer second time around.

It went quite well in that the cancer really didn't advance in the three and a half months I took the drug but it didn't back up either. The side effects built up as the treatment continued to the point that earlier this week the oncologist agreed to give it a break for a month or so to let my body recover from the poison.

Meanwhile, back in January there was a story in the Globe and Mail about some interesting news from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. A drug that had been used for some time to treat rare metabolic disorders in children had been found to have great effect on human cancer cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumors in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

This drug has not been tested on cancer inside the human body but I, like many others, are out of options. I have obtained a supply of this medicine and started taking it this week. I have created this blog to inform others who may be contemplating this route, or may be on it, of my experiences.

I want to be clear, I can't help anyone obtain this medication, I will not talk about how I got a supply other than to say that because the drug is still prescribed for metabolic conditions doctors, at least in Canada, can prescribe the medication though at some risk if the therapy goes sideways as the drug has not been through human trials.

About Me

I was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in March 2006. I have been through a great deal of treatment in the last year, detailed in my first post. I have just started taking dichloroacetate (DCA), a drug with great promise but to date no human testing. I can't wait for the trials that I am sure will begin later this year. I hope this blog of my experiences will help others.
dcaguineapig@gmail.com